Establishing Peace, Democratic Solution, and Democratic Nation
The PKK worked to overcome the impasse it experienced in resolving the Kurdish issue by subjecting the authority of the nation-state to comprehensive analysis. The August 15, 1984 campaign, during which the revolutionary people’s war escalated, was an arena where the influence of the socialist nation-state constructed within the PKK’s ideological and political fabric was most evident. It seemed difficult to progress without analyzing these influences, which gradually led to a stalemate. The rapid collapse of constructed socialism in the 1990s contributed to a better understanding of these influences hidden behind the crisis. What contributed to the dismantling of constructed socialism was the problematic of authority and the nation-state within constructed socialism. Or rather, it was the failure to analyze the issue of socialism, authority, and the state. This problem has prevailed in the crises of socialism that have manifested throughout the world. With the convergence of the contradictions of state and authority that the Kurdish issue has suffered from, along with the crisis of constructed socialism experienced throughout the world, it has become inevitable to subject the issue of state and authority to a radical analysis.
For this purpose, I devoted a significant portion of my argument to attempts to analyze the phenomenon of authority and the state throughout the history of civilization. I presented the most important points I focused on regarding the subject of the transformation that has occurred in this phenomenon in connection with capitalist modernity as the dominant civilization in our present. I explained in particular that the transformation of authority into a nation-state is considered the foundation of capitalism. This was an important proposition. I have endeavored to analyze that the transformation of capitalism into a dominant system is not possible unless the authority organizes itself as a nation-state. That is, the nation-state serves as the pivotal instrument that enables capitalist hegemony to extend. Consequently, I have attempted to improve the impossibility of socialism relying on the state model—that is, the impossibility of establishing itself as a constructed socialist nation-state, given that it presents itself as the historical anti-capitalist society. I have also sought to point out that Marx and Engels’ view that socialism cannot be established except on the basis of centralized nation-states constitutes a methodological error in scientific socialism. In contrast, I argued that it is impossible to establish socialism based on the state in general, and the nation-state in particular. I emphasized that insisting on this would lead to the most degraded and reckless forms of capitalism, as seen in numerous examples, most notably the constructed socialisms of Russia and China. As a necessity for this argument, I made intensive efforts to formulate comprehensive analyses of the centralized civil system throughout history, and of the concept of authority and the form of authority and the state in capitalist modernity, which is the dominant form of our present time. The fundamental conclusion I drew is that the principle of the nation-state does not exist for socialists, and that they must adhere to the democratic nation as the primary solution principle concerned with the national question. The KCK experience is the tangible expression of this on the ground.
